It is common practice to produce electrical connectors as preloaded connectors which comprise an insulating housing having the contact terminals inserted into cavities in the housing. When the connector is placed in service, wires are attached and connected to the individual terminals, usually by the use of an insertion machine or tool which inserts the individual wires into wire-receiving slots in the individual terminals and taught, for example, by U.S. Pat. No. 3,760,335. A variety of insertion or application tools are available for inserting wires into the wire-receiving slots of connectors of the type described in that patent. Automatic and semi-automatic tooling is used when the connectors are being installed on wires in a factory and hand tools are used for field installation. The hand tools are highly specialized and their use is justified only if a field technician is required to install a relatively large number of connectors on wire ends.
Under some circumstances, it would be desirable to avoid the need for a specialized tool for installing preloaded connectors on wire ends. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,662,701 (which is hereby incorporated by reference) discloses a distribution system for telephone lines or other data transmission lines in which a connector of the type described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,760,335 is installed at a central distribution site. Individual two-conductor plug connectors are used at the distribution site to connect a pair of two conductors at the distribution site to a particular station served by the distribution site. Thus, when a technician wishes to install a telephone or other type of equipment at a particular station, he will use a two-position plug connector on at least one end of a twisted pair of wires and insert the plug connector into the multi-contact distribution connector. He may use a two-position plug connector on the other ends of the wires as shown in FIG. 2 of U.S. Pat. No. 4,662,701. The distribution system described in that patent is extremely flexible and changes in the distribution pattern can be made very easily by simply interchanging the positions of the two-position plug connectors. The technician making wiring changes must then have available jumpers of varying lengths having two position plug connectors on their ends for making connections to the central distribution site and to the work station or other remote station. The lengths of these jumpers will depend upon the precise locations of the distribution site and the work station.
It would be desirable if the technician could be provided with a two position plug connector which would be preloaded and which could be installed on the ends of a twisted pair of wires without a specialized tool. The technician could then make his own jumper cables as required in the course of making wiring changes. The present invention, in accordance with one aspect thereof, is directed to the achievement of a two position plug connector of the general tYpe described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,662,701, which can be installed on the ends of two wires without the use of a specialized tool.
In accordance with a further aspect thereof, the invention is directed to the achievement of a preloaded electrical connector which does not require installation tooling and which might be used under a wide variety of circumstances other than as a two wire plug connector as described above.